Who’s really lying in the American election?

Politicians stretch the truth and it’s something the American public has become accustomed to. This election in particular has been marred by emails, conspiracy theories and outright lies, prompting Trump supporters in the Alt-Right to call this the post-fact era.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the face of the Alt-Right and die-hard Trump supporter, spoke about how the post-fact era has helped his movement and the Trump Campaign alike:

“The Washington Post gives a truth check, and no one cares. Now you have to use the truth and other strategies. You have to be persuasive. Dumpy lesbian feminists and shrieking harpies in the Black Lives Matter movement are not persuasive…”

Milo Yiannopoulos, leader of the Alt-Right and die-hard Trump supporter

Although Trump has been the primary source of misinformation throughout the primary and general election, there seems to be a disparity among his supporters, and independent voters, on who gets to lie.

Clinton is often characterized as untrustworthy, a claim that has followed her from the very start of her infamous private server email controversy—the main cause of her unpopularity among the average American voter. It has spread from the email controversy to conspiracies on Benghazi, which has helped waste taxpayer dollars, and ultimately made this election easier for a demagogic candidate like Donald Trump to campaign against her.

It is in fact Trump who makes headlines for his baseless assertions which now occur regularly. His hold on the news cycle persists precisely because of his inconsiderateness toward facts and his peddling of multiple conspiracies.

At each and every one of his campaign rallies Donald Trump’s unhinged and off-script approach to politicking has turned this election cycle on its head. Fact check after fact check, a majority of the claims he makes are proven to be false. But Trump is seemingly impervious to being made accountable, in part because of the indifference of his supporters to his lies and a hyper-focus on Clinton’s, even if she has fibbed less.

Trump lied 100+ times during all three debates compared to only 13 lies for Clinton

Today, in a NYT article, Your Facts or Mine?, Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star counted 104 false claims made by Trump during the three presidential debates—compared to Hillary’s 13 false claims. But that’s all water under the bridge. Many Americans didn’t care to know if they were hearing the truth. The prevailing narrative—despite evidence showing who has actually lied more this election—is that Clinton is a liar, Trump is a political outsider, and both are less than ideal candidates. As long as the facts align with their political beliefs, fact checks are fine.

PolitFact has stats that tell a similar story. Trump has 220 false statements on record compared to 75 for Clinton. But many Trump supporters will chalk up numbers like this to “pervasive and liberal media bias” against their candidate.

Charlie Sykes spoke to Business Insider about what he saw as Trump supporter’s fraught relationship with facts:

“Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bullshit.’ There’s nobody — you can’t go to anybody and say, ‘Look, here are the facts.'”

Another conservative talk show host John Ziegler has expressed similar experiences. He said, “if you don’t accept that it’s likely Hillary Clinton has taken part in multiple murders… it’s almost as if you’re a sellout.”

The “post-fact era” has only helped Donald Trump while not having a similar effect on Clinton’s popularity. In fact, it seems like the American public has become numb to the regularity of Trump’s lies—taking his antics as a given. Hillary, on the other hand, is still recovering from past controversies that have already been formally resolved.

Who gets to lie this election? Someone’s trumped the power of the fact check and the common sense of a sizable portion of the electorate. The post-fact era has enabled Trump to be above serious scrutiny as other politicians have been in the past, including Hillary Clinton.